Bolivar: The Epic Life of the Man Who Liberated South America - Hardcover

The case for Bolívar as one of the world's most extraordinary 19th-century leaders is well made by Marie Arana ... Arana's prose is often beautiful. A novelist turned historian, she tells Bolívar's story wonderfully ... Two centuries after his death, Bolívar inflames passions that better-known characters no longer ignite. Arana's biography explains why. (Giles Tremlett THE OBSERVER)

I suspect that one reason why her biography is so plausible and engagingly told is that the Peruvian-born Arana is herself a writer of fiction. Like Garcia Marquez (who memorably fictionalised Bolivar in The General in his Labyrinth), she has an instinct for the vitalising detail...As well, his sad and contradictory story demands a novelist's empathy. (Nicholas Shakespeare DAILY TELEGRAPH)

Arana's account of Bolivar leading his rag-bag army across the dizzying heights of the Paramo de Pisba - a virtual wall of ice and scree - is gripping stuff...Equally compelling are Arana's accounts of Bolivar's countless affairs, especially with his principal mistress, Manuela Saenz, whose ambiguous sexuality and scandalous behaviour earned her notoriety across Bolivar's vast fiefdom. (Giles Milton MAIL ON SUNDAY)

Marie Arana has done a superb job...with a biography that is as enjoyable as a novel, capturing the imagination with its fluid prose and the power of the drama that unfolded as the age of revolution reached Spanish America. (Eduardo Posada-Carbo THE TABLET)

Thrilling, authoritative and revelatory, here at last is a biography of Bolivar, the maker of South America, that catches the sheer extraordinary unique adventure and titanic scale of his life with accessible narrative and scholarly judgement. (Simon Seabag Montefiore)

Arana is an indefatigable researcher, a perceptive historian, and a luminous writer, as shown in her
defining, exhilarating biography of the great South American liberator Simón Bolívar.

(Brad Hooper BOOKLIST (USA))

The George Washington of South America cuts a dashing though dark-edged and ultimately tragic figure in this rousing biography. Peruvian journalist Arana (American Chica) chronicles Gen. Simón Bolívar's struggle against the Spanish Empire in the 1810s and '20s through several dizzying cycles of battlefield victory, triumphal procession, demoralizing reversal, and squalid exile, before he finally drove imperial forces out of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Her vivid portrait shows us a charismatic man of high ideals, fiery oratory, unflagging energy and resolve, bold strategies, and a romantic aura-"he rode, ragged and shirtless... his wild long hair riding the wind"-that women found irresistible. (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (USA))

Inspired. . . . Arana ably captures the brash brilliance of this revered and vilified leader. (KIRKUS REVIEWS (USA))

In "Bolívar: American Liberator," Bolívar emerges as a complex and confounding human being. He was the essential figure in the revolutionary wars that created five South American countries. Brilliant and erudite, he was an idealist and also a ruthless military leader as well as a deeply charismatic a man of letters (Hector Tobar LOS ANGELES TIMES (USA))

"Bolivar" is a monumental achievement destined to win some major literary prizes. Like most recent books on the North American founders, it assumes that all icons are also flawed creatures. All of Bolivar's flaws are on display here - his inveterate womanizing, periodic bouts of arrogance, flirtation with Napoleonic versions of omnipotence. But if Jefferson is eventually proved right, and democracy does come to Latin America in full form, the man so brilliantly recovered in these pages will be shouting hosannas from the heavens. (Joseph J Ellis WASHINGTON POST (USA))

Simon Bolivar's life makes for one of history's most dramatic canvases, a colossal narrative filled with adventure and disaster, victory and defeat. This is the story not just of an extraordinary man but of the liberation of a continent. Drawing on a wealth of primary documents, Marie Arana brilliantly captures early 19th-century South America and the explosive tensions that helped revolutionise the young Simon Bolivar. In 1813 he launched a campaign for the independence of Colombia and Venezuela, commencing a dazzling career that would take him across the rugged terrain of South America. From his battlefield victories to his ill-fated brief marriage and legendary love affairs, Bolivar emerges in this compelling biography as a man of many facets: fearless general, brilliant strategist, consummate diplomat, passionate abolitionist and gifted writer. A major work of history, Arana colourfully portrays this dramatic life and explores the rivalries and turmoil that bedevilled Bolivar's tragic last days.